review

The P Word

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Waleed Akhtar and Esh Alladi. Photo by Craig Fuller

The P Word by Waleed Akhtar – Bush Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Waleed Akhtar’s two-hander, The P Word, returns to the Bush Theatre amid high expectations. Its first run resulted in the 2023 Olivier Award for Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, placing author and performer Waleed Akhtar in some stellar company as one of four wins in a row for the Bush, including Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer. The production, by original director Anthony Simpson-Pike is more than capable of rising to the occasion, although it is salutary that a play about the mistreatment of gay men remains so current.

The P Word concerns two characters, Bilal or Billy, as he prefers to be known, played by Waleed Akhtar, and Zofar, played by Esh Alladi. Billy is a young, gay British Pakistani man struggling with his ethnic identity. Cycling through constant hook-ups, he starts to want the stable relationship he’s never found, while distancing himself from his family, who tolerate him only if he does not discuss the fact he is gay. Meanwhile, Zofar is stuck in an asylum holding pattern in grim accommodation in Hounslow. He fled Pakistan after his father had his lover murdered and threatened to kill him, when he discovered his son’s sexuality.

The play builds slowly. The two characters circle one another without meeting for a significant portion of the evening. A clever set, a raised, split revolve designed by Max Johns, facilitates this and later providing a series of places for the pair to sit and meet when they finally connect. Both actors give engaging performances. Akhtar is good at convincnig others than he is just in it for the sex and the good times, but becomes increasingly less good at convincing himself. He lashes out against Pakistanis – using the ‘p’ word of the title – and Muslims, but he is also funny and charming. It takes Alladi’s wiser but more damaged Zofar to let him see the value of his identity and the absurdity of his cultural assumptions. Alladi’s performance is full of character, enthusiasm and very believable desperation.

There is little doubt from the very start that the pair will get together, but it takes longer than it should for it to happen. However, once it does the play really comes alive, and delivers a series of increasingly moving encounters as the pair find out who they really are, and what they will risk to protect one another. From here on in, the audience is fully behind the couple as they experience the brutality of UK immigration, the random homophobia and random kindness of London, and the difficulty of being safe if you are gay, and especially if you are also from South Asia. Akhtar’s play is a powerful statement, highlighting experiences that are little known, and delivering a strong campaigning message about the cruel deportation of queer people from the UK, often to face death. It is an emotionally stretching, intellectually engaging evening which leaves you feeling you’ve experienced much more than a play.

Handle With Care

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Handle With Care by Ontoerend Goed – Camden People’s Theatre, London

Ontoerend Goed are masters and mistresses of theatre-making, maintaining an unerring focus on the question, generally overlooked, of why we – the audience – are there. In doing so, they are very willing to break through the boundaries of what we consider theatre to be. This reaches an apogee with Handle With Care, in which they do actually turn up. The entireity of the show is contained on a box delivered to the theatre and placed on the stage, alongside cards on each seat which read “The performance begins when someone opens the box”. It is a delightful and rather brilliant conceit. I don’t know whether anyone has ever failed to open the box, but on the night I attended someone got down to it straight away. Eventually wearing a cap, provided, reading ‘Not the director’ they initiated a train of instructions setting out the dramaturgy for the performance, and bringing various audience members into carry out tasks.

Without giving too much away, the point is that every performance will be different, as it made by audience content, engagement and attitudes. Of course, all theatre is different every time, but Handle With Care swings the focus away from the stage to the people who attend every night, who are the cause of what happens on stage, and also the difference. With subtle touches, Ontoerend Goed open up the potential for moments of deep reflection, startling emotion, unexpected exuberbance and spontaneous creativity. Can an audience fill an hour essentially entertaining itself? Handle With Care shows that yes, they emphatically can. Simply occupying a space with strangers is one of humanity’s most powerful and underutilised resources. Ontoerend Goed make most theatre seem shallow and naïve, cutting directly through to what matters with uncanny precision. In some ways, all of their cumulative experience and power as a company is contained in this magical box.

Krapp’s Last Tape / Godot’s To Do List

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Photo by Jack English

Godot’s To Do List by Leo Simpe-Asante / Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett / – Royal Court Theatre, London

The Royal Court’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape is generously prefaced by a new short play written by Leo Simpe-Asante, which won the inaugural Royal Court Young Playwrights Award last year. Shakeel Haakim plays a flustered, bowler-hatted Godot who is at the mercy of a recorded female voice highly reminiscent of Alexa, voiced by Flora Ashton. Directed by Aneesha Srinivasan, the show takes place in front of the chaotic set for Krapp’s Last Tape, piled with boxes. Godot is apparently unable to do anything other than peform the endless tasks set by the voice, many of which are ridiculous or ill-advised. Haakim has the engaging presence of a natural comic, although the play does not develop far beyond its basic premise, which is a good joke but perhaps doesn’t tell us much that we don’t expect to hear.

The main attraction is Gary Oldman’s Krapp. Oldman has directed and designed the production as well, of course, as playing 69-year old Krapp as he confronts his younger self, addressing him from Reel 3, Spool 5. Oldman begins in a good humour, which rapidly dissipates as he realises the extent of the changes that happen while we are looking elsewhere. Beckett’s work is masterfully focused, every word hitting home hard. It is one of the greatest male roles in theatre and, as such, there is doubtless a temptation for an actor to make it their own, and leave their mark. This is evident in Oldman’s production and performance. He is very good, and anyone seeing his interpretation as their first will have a very worthwhile evening, but it feels like a crowded performance.

The set is very literal – a hoarder’s cavern of piled boxes of junk and teetering shelves, which Krapp roots through to locate the relevant spool. Alongside, Oldman gives the impression of playing an old man. This is not necessary. Beckett, surely, intends the actor to play themself. It’s only through being entirely oneself, on the surface unaltered from the 39-year old on tape, that the true horror of passing time is revealed to the actor and the audience. Stephen Rea understood this better in his 2025 Barbican performance, which left space all around for the darkness and, perhaps, a little hope to seep in.

John Proctor is the Villain

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Photo by Camilla Greenwell

John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower

Kimberly Belflower’s play premièred in the US in 2022, and has been successfully revived twice already, most recently on Broadway last year directed by Danya Taymor. It’s UK première at the Royal Court is a recast version of her production,. Set in 2018, during the increasingly distant #metoo era, it re-examines the gender politics and in-built prejudice of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, as studied by a high school class of five girls, one of whom is absent for reasons that become apparent. The girls, questioning standard assessments of John Proctor as a hero of American drama, propose the formation of a school feminist club. Their teacher, Mr. Smith, who they admire and, in some cases, fancy deems it too controversial, but suggests bringing in two boys, after which it apparently flies under the local social radar. The relationships between the pupils and their teacher become complex in ways that, although not for revealing in a review, are hardly surprising.

This is the problem with the production. Nothing presented on stage feels unexpected or new, and there is a sense that the audience is having its world view confirmed. The most shocking aspect of the play, to a UK audience, is the idea that feminism is so controversial an idea that a school would stop pupils discussing it for fear of ‘what people might say’ – a truly terrifying bulletin from US conservatism. But the production itself displays a level of conservatism that makes it seem old-fashioned in comparison to the work the Royal Court is staging from British writers at the moment. The characters of the girls seem surprisingly formulaic, like types rather than individuals. There are some highlights among the performers. Sadie Soverall is excellent as the awkward but Shelby, who arrives like a ticking time bomb. Reece Braddock as the sweetly daft Mason is very funny – the two boys are both convincingly written as teenage idiots, but he has the better role. Dónal Finn is strong as the charming, untrustworthy teacher who is the analogue for John Proctor.

However, the heavily realistic classroom set by AMP featuring Teresa L. Williams, and Taymor’s direction, tie the action down, while the writing makes it difficult to believe that many of the characters are real people. The play is well-intentioned, and its John Proctor-cancelling is an intriguing, even exciting ideological position. Despite this, the production and performance-style seem leaden-footed. The climactic moment, with the girls taking over the classroom and dancing to Lorde’s ‘Green Light’, feels manufactured and fails to deliver the catharsis it insistently sells to the audience.

Guess How Much I Love You?

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Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo. Photo by Johan Persson.

Guess How Much I Love You? by Luke Norris – Royal Court Theatre

The first show in the Royal Court’s much-anticipated 70th anniversary season sets high standards. Luke Norris’s new play is a two-hander, with a brief appearance by a third performer, set in cramped interior spaces, but it fills the main stage effortlessly. It concerns a couple, played by Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, going through the emotional pressures that come with trying to have a baby. It is difficult to write about the plot of ‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ without giving key events away, but it is fair to say that things do not go as they had planned. The play has an intensity to it with is rarely seen on stage. Played in the corners of a series of rooms – their flat, a hospital room, a doctor’s examination room – there is both a claustrophobia and an ordinariness to their experiences, especially as Grace Smart’s sets make these corners just a little tighter than ninety degrees. The walls are closing in on them.

The pair, unnamed, are ordinary too, but Norris’s writing pulls apart what ordinary means. The initial tensions in their relationship – for example over whether porn is exploitative or not – hint at Sheehy’s resentment of the role she is already playing, as she waits, pregnant, mid-ultrasound. As events spiral, the pair are faced with impossible moral choices and the way they treat each other becomes brutal in a deeply uncomfortable way. There is more than a hint of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ about the deep levels of love/hate played out on stage in scenes which seem too private for us to be watching. However, there is more emotional truth in the play than in Edward Albee. Although they say the most appalling things, it is entirely believable that people in their situation would react the way they do. The horror of living has rarely been exposed so honestly.

Jeremy Herrin’s direction brings out two very powerful pieces acting from Aramayo and Sheehy. He is patient, defensive, desperate and unable to cope. She is a ball of grief and pure anger. Rosie Sheehy will surely be in the running for awards for her performance, which is simply extraordinary. She is incredibly vulnerable in her deep distress, and there are a couple of moments when she completely lets go, with speeches that are difficult to hear and impossible to turn away from. Her commitment is total.

‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ is a lean and brilliant play, with an unwavering focus on the nature of love, what happens when it goes wrong, and how people really behave in a crisis. Norris also weaves in themes of religion and gender roles in a way that feels natural. There is a particular moment in the play that makes the audience’s hearts drop as though they were an express lift, but the entire evening is an unrelentingly intense experience. A play which pushes the capacity of theatre to communicate to its limits is the perfect start to the year for the Royal Court.

Playboy of the Western World

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Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge – National Theatre: Lyttleton

Caitríona McLoughlin’s production J.M. Synge’s masterpiece seems to be the first at the National Theatre since 1976, which is extraordinary. The play, once a staple of amateur dramatics, has perhaps become a little forgotten in the UK, although not in Ireland. McLoughlin is the artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and brings an all-Irish cast to London to familiarise new audiences with a play that once caused riots.

Synge’s writing is remarkable – both deeply lyrical, with a powerful ear for speech patterns in the west of Ireland, and blackly comic. Both must have been revelatory for 1907, when the play premiered in Dublin. The play is populated entirely with people of no social consequence living in a poor, even despised part of the country, but Synge makes their language a thing of beauty. It’s set in a pub, where characters talk in a way they might not elsewhere. At the same time, he punctuates the play with the kind of comic violence – Old Mahon, who just won’t die – which seems remarkably modern. Playboy could be seen as the origin play for the subsequent century of Irish drama, from Friel and to McPherson to McDonagh.

McLoughlin, on a widescreen set by Katie Davenport, gives the production life and movement, if not always consistency. The cast is fascinating, but offers a range of peformance styles that do not always gel. At one end of the scale is Siobhán McSweeney’s urbane Widow Quin, giving it her all when trying her luck with Christy Mahon, but experienced enough to let it go and change tack too. At the other end is Lorcan Cranitch’s Michael Flaherty. Cranitch gives a performance that threatens to steal the entire play. In a very thick Mayo accent, he builds up to a dramatically drunken entrance on his return from a wake where “You’d never see the match of it for flows of drink.” He plays an entire scene while in a highly unbalanced state, constantly threatening to topple over, and the audience cannot look away. It is a complete tour de force. However, the contrasting performances do illustrate the production’s inconsistent tone.

Elsewhere, Éanna Hardwicke is extremely unnerving as Christy, gurning and almost slithering around the set. He leaves the audience unsure whether he’s a fool or a cunning chancer, or whether he’s sincere. Nicola Coughlan is fierce and charming as Pegeen Mike, but perhaps lacks the presence the part demands, to dominate a barroom full of people. However, her final scene, howling on her knees as Christy departs, is chilling. Marty Rea’s Shawn Keogh exudes weakness from his apologetic frame, while Declan Conlon is excellent as a domineering, physically threatening Old Mahon. The supporting cast are strong, especially the gaggle of local girls led by Marty Breen as Sara Tansey and Fionnuala Gygax as Honor Blake.

Despite some reservations, however, the play is fascinating and entertaining and very much reconfirming its classic status. The themes around easy celebrity and fickle popular opinion seem extremely current, while Pegeen Mike’s sexual independence, and the unashamed interest of women in sex, which triggered the 1907 riots, is refreshing and seems well ahead of its time. And Synge’s language remains a thing of wonder. Its dense wordplay makes no compromise whatsoever for the watching, listening public and, as a result, draws them deep into a parallel world. Playboy remains thrilling after all these years.

Twelfth Night

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Michael Grady-Hall, Gwyneth Keyworth and Samuel West. Photos by Helen Murray.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare – Barbican Theatre, London

Prasanna Puwanarajah’s production of Twelfth Night is a fascinating combination of genuinely funny comedy, and the underlying darkness that hangs over the play. There’s greater emphasis on the comedy though than in many productions, driven by the central figure of Feste, played with great presence by Michael Grady-Hall. He opens the evening, descending on a wire playing a guitar and singing, and takes a prominent role as intermediary between the stage and the audience. His post-interval audience interaction – an extended game of catch – goes on much longer than most performers could get away with, but no-one resents it. Dressed like a bumble bee in one of James Cotterill’s entertaining costumes, he performs a number of impressive physical turns but also spans the melancholy elements of the play, bringing tears to the eye with his performance of the play’s songs.

The production has a strong cast, offering distinctive interpretations. Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola is no-nonsense, but rapidly flustered at the idea of dressing as a boy. Daniel Monks brings a certain incel quality to an Orsino with an edge. Joplin Sibtain’s Toby Belch is a tragic figure destroyed by alcohol, tall and lurching like a 1970s French House drunk. Danielle Henry makes Maria the character in the play you would actually want to spend time with, sharp and human. Freema Agyeman was off the night I saw the play and, annoyingly, her excellent understudy as Olivia was not identified, either in the theatre or through my subsequent enquiry to the RSC press office.

Sam West’s masterful Malvolio adds complete assurance to the production. He is one of those performers whose presence makes the audience relax, ready to sit back and enjoy his skills. He takes the character from chippy to hilarious – a ludicrous cross-gartered scene – to alarmingly vengeful, as though it was a natural character arc. Played against James Cotterill’s surreal giant church organ set, Puwanarajah delivers a show that fully understands of the humour and complexity of this strange but irresistible play.

Bog Witch

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Photo by Lucy Powell

Bog Witch by Bryony Kimmings – Soho Theatre, Walthamstow

Bryony Kimmings’s last show was in 2018, in a different era. Her disturbingly personal and raw shows made her a 2010s fringe star. Her unpredictable, apparently chaotic style proved highly influential on the style of alternative theatre performers. Now she’s back with her first show since having a son, separating from her partner (Tim Grayman, well known to audiences from their joint show, Fake it ‘til you Make it), and moving to the countryside with a man called Will. Bog Witch unpicks this experience. To some extent it is classic Kimmings. She is disconcertingly direct, about herself and the way she feels, tells rude jokes, and wears ludicrous costumes. She is a very engaging performer, always undercutting herself with double takes at her own explanations. The audience loves her, and there is a very welcoming atmosphere in the vast, gleaming, newly refurbished Walthamstow branch of the Soho Theatre.

However, Bog Witch does not deliver the energy levels of previous Kimmings work. The size of the venue does not help. Beautiful although it is, the new venue is much larger than any comparable fringe venue and there is a sense that this show would have worked better in a more intimate space, more suited to Kimmings confessional style. Working (for the first time?) with a co-director, Francesca Murray-Fuentes, Kimmings works hard to occupy the cavernous stage, using everything from a long white backcloth to an epic witch costume, rustic paraphernalia and an amusing ‘burning at the stake’ tableau. However, the work to achieve this detracts from the show, with Kimmings often engaged in moving props around.

There is also a lack of the wildness and abandon apparently promised by the title. Bog Witch is a controlled show, which threatens to flatline at a couple of points in the second half (not that there is an interval, despite the near 2-hour running time). The themes she is addressing are very grown-up – depression, miscarriage, social compromise, climate responsibility. She (her performance persona, that is) seems changed by her experiences of getting older and having to compromise more, with some of her edges rubbed away. We have to buy into her changed self to stay involved in the show. The story of redemption she has to tell lacks excitement at times, and the audience-participation finale is somewhat flat. Although watching Kimmings on stage is always a good use of time, this is not the most driven or electrifying of her shows.

The Land of the Living

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Juliet Stevenson, Tom Wlaschiha and Artie Wilkinson Hunt. Photo: Manuel Harlan

The Land of the Living by David Lan – National Theatre: Dorfman, London

Stephen Daldry’s production of David Lan’s new play, about the moral dilemmas in the aftermath of World War II and their lifelong consequences, piles the pressure on relentlessly. Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, now in her 70s, living in London. Someone she hasn’t seen for 50 years arrives – Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha) – and we watch the story of what happened to him unfold over the next two and a half hours. Ruth was a young woman working for the UN in Bavaria, the American sector, after the German surrender. She and her small team of women look for children stolen by the Nazis from Eastern Europe and checked for Aryan characteristics. Those who passed the tests were given to German families with new names. Those who did not were murdered. Once the children are identified, the hard part begins. Thomas is with parents who hide his real identity, but are distraught when he is removed. Ruth becomes attached to him, saving him from the fate of many children – removed en masse by the Russians or by the Americans to be rehomed. But she doesn’t send him back to Poland either, where he might have rediscovered his original family. He has flown to London from New York to reveal the consequences.

Daldry crosses the play’s two time periods over one another – literally, with Ruth and Thomas occupying either end of a long traverse stage holding Miriam Buether’s London apartment set .while the events of 1945 play out across the middle. The pacing is effective, with the flashback action erupting into the civilised lives they have both built. Stevenson is remarkable, her calm demeanour drawing the audience’s attention to the emotions shifting tectonically below the surface. Wlaschiha is blank faced, traumatised, and expressing himself through music – although it’s a shame he stands aside from the action for much of the play, providing a catalyst rather than participating. The character Thomas is a pianist, and Wlaschiha has remarkable skills too, performing live on the apartment piano as a number of other characters also do, including Stevenson. It is an ensemble performance, with strong performances from Kate Duchêne as Ruth’s mother, Marek Oravec and Cosima Shaw as Thomas’s adopted parents and Caroline Lonq as Elise in a cast that includes several European stage actors appearing at the National Theatre for the first time.

Lan has uncovered a little documented set of events from a time that is much pored over, and has constructed a rigorous, emotionally hard-hitting story. It is an excellent vehicle for the talents of its very high end cast and production team.